Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 08, 2013 @06:43PM
from the get-off-my-lawn dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Nowadays, it's not really a question of whether tablet shipments will surpass notebook shipments, but when. Back in July 2012, NPD forecasted 2016 as the year, but today it's saying this year will be it. More specifically, NPD estimated tablet shipments will reach more than 240 million units worldwide in 2013, compared to the company's projection of 207 million notebook shipments this year. This gap is significant enough that, even if NPD's estimates are out by some margin, tablet numbers will still overtake those of notebooks."

There are plenty of people who can do everything they use a computer for on a tablet. I would guess most of those people are not on/.
For example my mother and sister, both use their computers for email, facebook, a little research, some cheezy games (Solitaire) and that is pretty much it.

All of that can easily be done on a cheep tablet.

Personally I will keep my laptop with a keyboard, but even I do most of my email on my Nexus 7 these days.

Tablet makers addressed the issue by including HID support, so that keyboards / mice could be used. Some even include a standard size USB port, supporting thumb-drives in addition to input devices. This lets people use a tablet as a laptop when / if needed, and leave the excess baggage behind when it's not.

Except that the iPad has had Bluetooth keyboard support from the moment it was released, and there were Bluetooth cases with built-in keyboards shortly thereafter. Most opt never to buy one. It doesn't seem to have been the thing holding back any significant segment of the market.

That is a good point. Many parents rather give their children a tablet than a notebook or desktop, either because there are cheap tablets, there are no moving parts, children ask for them, or simply prefer to give their children the more controlled environment of a tablet in comparison to a normal PC. Don't forget that many schools also give their students a tablet nowadays.

Yeah, content creation is dead. We don't need to make anything more than an Instagram post to facebook and maybe respond with a tweet.

The goal of allowing people to compose symphonies or write great novels, or even code up a simple game is up in smoke. You have the tablet. Take a picture, write a tweet, and most importantly, consume the content of your walled garden.

How many people with desktop computers or standard laptops do any of the things you said? Content creation has always been something for the 1% of the computer users [wikipedia.org]. The only reason desktops where so popular in the 90s and laptops in the 00s is simple because there were no cheap tablets/smartphones yet. Most people just want to check their facebook/twitter, do some quick office work like school reports or taxes or just watch porn. But don't worry, content creation is not dead. Content creators will buy content creation tools. The existence of DSLR cameras, external sound boards, mixers, professional GPUs, pen tablets, 3D mouses, microcontroller programmers and the thousands of professional software tools for anything you can imagine are the proof that content creation is as alive as ever. Classical laptops and desktops will just shift in to this category as well.